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Broadband and Optical Networking

Applied Communication Sciences is at the forefront of efforts to ready access and backbone networks for a new era -- one dominated by ultra-high-bandwidth, dynamic, packet-based networks.

On the access side, we are working to assure uninterrupted service quality as service providers roll out more varieties of services and service-bundles over the same pipeline.

In the backbone, we are reinventing capacity management -- finding innovative ways to decide how much capacity to put in a network, where to put it, how to manage it, and how to keep track of it. The goal is to minimize capital costs, while enabling networks to provide a wide variety of on-demand customer services, as well as fixed services, while meeting resilience and fault-tolerance requirements.

Innovation in Action:

Our research has resulted in an approach to simultaneously enable bandwidth-on-demand and high resilience in wide area networks. Our solution combines network management and control plane signaling capabilities to enable very fast provisioning and restoration of packet and circuit services even in very high churn conditions; i.e., with high service volume, and/or multiple failures. This capability would support a highly dynamic cloud computing environment that involved data-center to data-center interaction; for example, for large dataset or virtual machine transfer. Our approach is consistent with commercial practices, and is designed to operate within stringent capacity constraints.

Our optical systems expertise is being leveraged into new areas, including LIDAR systems. Here we have developed novel systems concepts that have the potential to substantially improve system performance. In particular, we combine novel detection mechanisms with new image processing techniques to enable faster data acquisition times and more rapid scene reconstruction.

Innovation on the Horizon:

Demand for more secure fiber optic communications now permeates our economy -- it is a goal of government entities and virtually all large enterprises. Applied Communication Sciences is playing a leading role in moving the highly speculative field of Quantum Communications toward commercial applications to enable "absolute security" over fiber strands. The result will be the ability to prevent any unauthorized person from intercepting data sent over fiber, and to immediately detect any attempt at intrusion. Additional details on our quantum work can be discovered here.